TESTING OF A PRESIDENT: THE AUTHORS; A Young Protege of Starr, and an Established Nonfiction Writer

While the voluminous report released publicly today by Kenneth W. Starr is the product of many authors, much of the editing and writing was done by two lawyers, one of whom is a published author, according to the office of the independent counsel.

Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale-trained lawyer, is something of a Starr protege. Stephen Bates, a Harvard graduate, is a lawyer and a journalist who has written several nonfiction books.

Mr. Bates, who sources said wrote most of the narrative describing the relationship between the President and Monica S. Lewinsky, studied writing as well as the law.

In a brief interview, Mr. Bates said that he planned to continue working with Mr. Starr but declined to say much about his background.

Like Mr. Starr, Mr. Bates grew up in a small Texas town. A friend described his hometown, Pecos, as being ''way out near nowhere.'' And like Mr. Starr, he is known for his low-key and courteous demeanor.

Mr. Bates graduated from Harvard College in 1982 and Harvard Law School in 1987. Friends said he was determined to earn his living as a writer and not as a lawyer.

In his final year at Harvard Law School, Mr. Bates was accepted into an advanced fiction-writing class at Harvard that had only 10 students, most of them undergraduates. He made a lasting impression on his instructor, Monroe Engel.

His writing ''was not semi-autobiographical; it was much more sophisticated and very nonconfessional,'' said Mr. Engel, who was the director of Harvard's creative writing program. ''His work was fairly highly plotted, and he really had a sense of story and a good sense of scene.''

After law school, Mr. Bates wrote for publications as diverse as The Nation, The Weekly Standard, Playboy and The New Republic. He is also the author of several books, including ''Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms'' (Poseidon Press, 1993) and ''If No News, Send Rumors: Anecdotes of American Journalism'' (St. Martin's Press, 1989).

Mr. Bates, 40, has been characterized by some journalists and academics as a libertarian. He and Mr. Starr wrote a proposal a few years ago for a book called ''Bridget's Story'' that dealt with the separation of church and state. The book, said Lynn Chu, Mr. Bates's literary agent, would have focused on the case of Bridget Mergens, a high school student in Omaha, who was barred by her school from forming a Bible study group. Ms. Chu said that no publishing house expressed interest in the proposal.

Mr. Bates is a part-time employee of the independent counsel's office and the part-time literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly, the publication of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Mr. Kavanaugh, 33, is regarded as a rising star in Washington legal circles. Even though he is one of the youngest members of the independent counsel's legal team, he has been entrusted by Mr. Starr with some of the office's most difficult legal issues, in particular the White House's efforts to invoke a variety of privileges to block testimony.

Mr. Kavanaugh is a native of the Washington area. His mother is a Maryland state judge and his father is a lobbyist for the cosmetics industry. He is a 1987 graduate of Yale, where he majored in history, played on the junior varsity basketball team and was a reporter for The Yale Daily News.

His first job after graduating from Yale Law School was in Mr. Starr's office when he was Solicitor General. After joining the independent counsel's office, he led the investigation into the death of the deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr..

Mr. Kavanuagh left the office in 1997 but returned this spring to handle an appeal to the Supreme Court on an issue that became known as postmortem privilege. He argued and lost that case, in which the independent counsel had sought notes taken by Mr. Foster's lawyer, contending that the lawyer-client privilege ended with death.